They have not discovered a single valid reason to doubt his work
There is a problem: if you don’t want to watch the reasons, then you can’t see
them.
Jed, if the enrgy catalyzer will be proved as a hoax (or Rossi diseapper from
the public scenes [even with moneys]) then you will close the LENR-CANR website?
Since you have done so much support for Rossi...
From: Jed Rothwell
Sent: Thursday, August 25, 2011 7:56 PM
To: vortex-l@eskimo.com
Subject: Re: [Vo]:The day after Rossi
Daniel Rocha danieldi...@gmail.com wrote:
Pretty much the total destruction of all confidence I have in LENR. If so
many competent people in the field were cheated that easily by Rossi, I can
expect much worse from everyone, even in the sense of self deception.
Some questions:
How many competent people in the field are convinced by Rossi? How many stand
to be cheated in any sense? As far as I know, you can count them on one hand. A
lot of people are paying close attention. Many, including me, think that the
weight of evidence is in favor of the claims, based on previous Ni-H claims and
so on.
Some people from outside the field say they are convinced, such as Levi, and
EK. They have actually performed tests themselves so they can judge the issue
better than most people, and they have more reason to be convinced. If I had
observed the 18-hour test in person, I would probably be 100% convinced. (I
would also have reported it in much more detail than Levi has done, but that's
another story.)
If Levi, EK and a few others who have not previously had anything to do with
cold fusion have been fooled by Rossi, why would this reflect badly on people
such as McKubre, Miles or Fleischmann? As far as I know, they have not said
they believe this. They have not said they don't believe it either. I have been
in contact with them. They are keenly interested, of course. Who wouldn't be?
I myself am waiting for better test results before reaching any final
conclusion. I lean strongly toward it being real, as I said. But as I have also
said repeatedly, Defkalion has published nothing so I cannot judge their
claims. The 18-hour flow test was good enough for its purpose, which was for
Levi to decide whether to go ahead with more testing or not. It was pretty
convincing and I have not seen any reason to doubt it, but no one familiar with
experimental science would bet the farm on one test of this nature.
If Rossi turns out to be a fraud, or hugely mistaken for some reason, the
skeptics here will deserve no credit for predicting this. They have not
discovered a single valid reason to doubt his work that was not obvious to
everyone, including me. None of their criticism were any more informed or hard
hitting than Celani's, Storms', mine, or others who lean toward believing this.
As far as I know, skeptics have not suggested any improvements to the test
techniques that Storms, I and others have not already suggested. The memo
quoted here recently about the steam sparge test, for example, is something I
wrote to Rossi himself months ago. I suggested he let me do that test during a
visit to his lab. I planned to spend all day, repeating it 5 or 10 times, and I
also wanted to do to a flowing water test. Rossi turned me down, as I reported
here. I circulated that memo to various other people and I may have published
it here. It was not a bit confidential. It is not a bit original, either. I did
not come up with the idea. As the original memo text says, I learned this
technique at Hydrodynamics.
If Rossi is wrong, the skeptics will NOT have demonstrated any special insight
or ability to predict an outcome. Most experiments fail. Most results are
wrong. Most product RD is scrapped before the product reaches the market. If
you always bet that a new experimental result will be wrong, you will be on the
winning side most of the time. This is Robert Park's technique. He predicts
an outcome that everyone knows is likely, and then he takes credit when things
turn out as everyone knew they probably would. This is like predicting that Las
Vegas slot machines will win more money than they lose.
- Jed
